The First YC Conference

http://ycombinator.posterous.com/the-first-yc-conference

by snewe • 16 years ago

116 45 16 years ago

ycombinator.posterous.com

I would pay money to attend such a thing. Is this open to the public, or invite only? Not a whole lot of details listed here.

mrduncan2• 16 years ago

It sounds like it's only open to YC founders (and invited guests) based on the following: The speakers were completely open, because they knew they didn't have to worry about someone cherry picking quotes in a blog post to make them look bad.

abstractbill3• 16 years ago

Yeah, there were a lot of anecdotes ("one time, when I was working for company X..."). It was very useful to see concrete examples of how different companies have handled (or mishandled!) a wide range of SEO problems, but of course also very obvious why this stuff could only be talked about off the record.

mrshoe• 16 years ago

Now I want to do YC just to get into these conferences.

mrduncan2• 16 years ago

If you haven't before, make sure you apply for a spot at Startup School (http://startupschool.org/) this year. It's run by YC and open to non-founders.

Edit: This is of course assuming that there will be a Startup School in 2010 since it hasn't been announced that I'm aware of yet.

pg3• 16 years ago

Yes, there will be Startup School in 2010. Sometime in the fall.

jazzychad2• 16 years ago

I realize there is probably some jest in that sentiment, but if you only want to do YC for these sorts of things then you're not in it for the right reasons.

The extra events are certainly a nice perk, but the main focus is definitely bringing something to market that people want.

ynniv• 16 years ago

I'm with the original commenter: I can make something that people want without being part of YC, but the YC networking events are not independently reproducible. Many people say that higher education is going to lose out to online programs, but that opinion is oblivious to the institutional benefits that universities provide.

YC is becoming a similar institutional organization, where membership provides value independently of the reason for membership. That has interesting implications, as pg has said that Harvard/Stanford/MIT YC applicants statistically do no better than others. I would be very interested in a comparison of YC's output to similar programs (TechStars) to see if YC has succeeded in attracting / developing a statistically "better" population, or if YC membership benefits are being squandered on an arbitrary few.

There is a benefit to having a trusted crowd, but there may be a better way to decide who is "in". OTOH, it is good business for YC to nurture companies that it has invested in.

e1ven3• 16 years ago

I can't say I agree at all.

People can create a startup for lots of reasons- Wanting to change the world, wanting to make a lot of money, wanting to disrupt a market, whatever they want. That's great. I wish them well.

YC is one way to get things started. It provides a pittance of money- $15K isn't really enough to fund substantial development, but it's enough to help build momentum.

The biggest thing that YC does provide is Networking and advice. Meeting with PG et all is a great way to get good advice on how improve your product, and how to handle the trickier aspects of running a company, such as buyouts, raising additional capital, and the like.

But beyond working with the YC staff, one of the other really nice advantages is working with the YC network. There is an ever increasing group of people who have gone through the same process you are- Who know a lot about what you're doing, and often have Great advice on what to do next.

To my mind, they're one of the best reasons to join YC. The problem is, like everything else that YC is facing right now, it needs to scale. Kn0thing can't meet with 400 founders to discuss the sale of Redit to Conde Nast.. While it'd be great, that'd be his new full-time job.

Holding a conference allows him to tell the same story once, and have everyone hear it. He can take questions, and answer them for everyone, rather than having 25 people ask the same variation of a question over and over.

So to your main point- I love the conference idea, and I think it's a great value-add to YC. People might do a startup for any number of reasons, but this increases the value of YC being a part of yours.

maxklein• 16 years ago

You know what we should do? Get a hotdog stand, then set up shop right outside where the conference is happening. Then when people get hungry, they come out for hotdogs, and we'll be like: hey, it's mrshoe and maxklein from news.yc, so, what did the speaker just say. Then we take notes.

Then they'd invite us for the after party, and we'd blow all the money we made from hotdogs on drinks, get them drunk AND get even more information about the conference.

vaksel• 16 years ago

might as well just bug the room

or hack the anybots robot's webcam feed

lsb• 16 years ago

Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

kyro• 16 years ago

Are you looking for another cofounder? I'm a rockstar hotdog flipper and am knowledgeable in condiment spreading.

rms• 16 years ago

Hot dogs? Why not just skip a step and sell beer and tequila shots outside of the conference?

sinzone• 16 years ago

Firs of all, YC is about amazing people, and only later about amazing conferences.

abstractbill3• 16 years ago

The conference was incredibly useful. I'm looking forward to more of these.

FreeRadical2• 16 years ago

What is 'referral traffic'? :/

stanleydrew• 16 years ago

Referral traffic is the traffic one site sends to another through direct linking. In this case if you add up all the traffic that third party sites get from all search engines, Google is the originating site for 85% of that traffic.

It basically means that a lot of people are searching yahoo for things like "yahoo mail" and "yahoo games." Those searches aren't likely to generate referrals to sites outside of yahoo.

spencerfry• 16 years ago

The powerpoint is really good:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/27319437/SEO-for-Startups-YCombina...

FreeRadical2• 16 years ago

I wonder if this will eventually turn into a launch event for YC start-ups

webwright3• 16 years ago

It was a blast-- as a panelist I learned a lot from Rand (who lives and breaths SEO).

Check out his post and certainly check out: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors - it's the most definitive work on ranking factors out there. Once you grok that, it's all about psychology-- figure out what would motivate the "linkerati" to link to you (and tweet about you).

ntoshev• 16 years ago

I wonder how successful SEOs actually are in reverse-engineering Google. These pretty graphs look scientific, but they are based on an aggregation of opinions.

Also the current state with the "linkerati" having disproportionate influence on ranking is natural (there have always been people with bigger influence on what others think) but they are arguably less objective than the end users, so diminishing their influence might improve search results. One way for Google to do it would be to evaluate the topic of the page / site that links to you, and make the link count for more if the source and the target page / site are consistently about the same topic.

webwright3• 16 years ago

@pg I think a great one would be "b2b customer acquisition". This was one of those things that we realized was CRAZY HARD and (anecdotally) I've heard a few other YC startups who have run into this wall. Stuff like inside vs. outside sales, lead generation techniques, hiring salesfolks, adwords, etc.

Of course this stuff only applies to maybe 25% of YC companies out of the gates (tho eventually, even the consumer plays have to hire ad-sales guys).

pg3• 16 years ago

Good idea. Maybe we should make it be about getting paying users generally.

Alex3917• 16 years ago

The process for getting consumers to pay $5 is completely different than the process for getting someone to pay 25k, so I think it makes more sense to split them up. Even just focusing on lead generation would make a lot of sense, since that's one of the hardest parts of B2B sales.

drusenko• 16 years ago

A Freemium-type conference would be really interesting to us...

webwright3• 16 years ago

Amen. I've heard a lot of people run into same issue we did (wufoo and Joe Kraus' Jotspot both talked about this issue). We started with a free product, turned a paid product and promptly said, "WTF! Why aren't people buying our premium stuff?!" It was a long learning-intensive road to get smart(er) about freemium.

justin• 16 years ago

A no bullshit advertising conference might be good as well. We've learned tons of stuff on network vs direct sales that took a long time to figure out, and the fact that the advertising industry is filled with less than intelligent non-engineering people didn't help that process.

immad• 16 years ago

Yeah, great idea. We (Heyzap) can add a bunch of ideas but would love to hear how everyone else does it.

pbiggar3• 16 years ago

Yes, we definitely need this.

e1ven3• 16 years ago

Will these conferences be recorded, such that they're available for YC Summer 2010 companies and beyond?

I understand that people want to keep things private, and not talk to the whole world, but assuming YC continues to do well, there will be scores of companies for years to come. It would be valuable to have access to the presentations for the incoming class.

pg3• 16 years ago

We'll just have new conferences on the same topic. Answers evolve anyway.

e1ven3• 16 years ago

That's entirely a fair attitude, but since you'll likely end up replacing speakers, as to not repeat yourself, people will miss out of valuable knowledge.

It'd be useful to hear how Company A sold itself, not just how Companies BCD sold themselves.

I might suggest recording the talks, even if you never intend to show them to anyone.

Having the media recorded gives you the option of changing your mind later.

bhp• 16 years ago

Was the conference recorded?

If not, I'm sure everyone here would love to watch the next one on uStream. If not, what are the reasons it shouldn't be streamed?

ALee• 16 years ago

oh my, you just mentioned uStream. I think you meant to say Justin.tv

pbiggar3• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure they never will be. The speakers couldn't be candid if they were.

Harj• 16 years ago

never say never. if there's a topic where there wouldn't be reason for off-the-record stuff, we'd be happy to stream it. it's hard to think of something right now, possibly hiring.

The First YC Conference

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